Introduction

Introduction

Hip hop is said to be invented by the Jamaican Kool DJ Herc in 1973 in New York’s Bronx (Blanchard, 1999). He used an new turntable technique to stretch a song’s drum break (Blanchard, 1999). Rap, the lyrics of the music came up when DJ’s were playing at a hip hop event and people started to comment on the abilities of the DJ (Blanchard, 1999). Hip hop as both a musical genre and a culture reached different parts of the world. In the Netherlands this resulted in the genre Nederhop (Koreman, 2014). It was adapted to the Dutch market, especially by using the Dutch language. Nederhop is highly influenced by american hip hop. Both dutch and american hip hop music are embedded in a different culture, which makes it interesting to research how they differ from each other. In this study the Spotify Developer toolkit is used to analyse both musical styles, based on a corpus. This resulted in the following research question: How does Dutch hip hop compare to US hip hop in terms of their Spotify features?

References:

Blanchard, B. (1999). The social significance of rap & hip-hop culture. Journal of Poverty & Prejudice, Spring.

Koreman, R. (2014). Legitimating Local Music: Volksmuziek, Hip-Hop/Rap and Dance Music in Dutch Elite Newspapers. Cultural Sociology, 8(4), 501-519.


Image

Corpus

Corpus
URI’s Songs
Dutch hip hop spotify:user:1110731694:playlist:5Ady4U59sfaqcvwEoepX0L 789
American hip hop spotify:user:jonathangutsche:playlist:37HfKsPNsDABlvJmik64oa 449

(still looking for anothe suitable US hip hop playlist to have an equal amount of data for both styles)

First look at the data

These are the means and standard deviations for the numeric features.

mean_NL sd_NL mean_US sd_US
danceability 0.7484192 0.1187935 0.7123162 0.1390156
energy 0.6809003 0.1136148 0.6281838 0.1482333
loudness -6.4895139 1.7837852 -6.5298803 2.1895842
speechiness 0.2306640 0.1259915 0.1939838 0.1276423
acousticness 0.1950678 0.1738602 0.1617367 0.1791906
instrumentalness 0.0079862 0.0524010 0.0062895 0.0573666
liveness 0.1576976 0.1162372 0.1897637 0.1410569
valence 0.5754614 0.1913549 0.4191156 0.2041700
tempo 118.7182866 27.9743048 124.9440962 30.1364627

The values for American and Dutch hip hop are very much alike. It can be noticed that the standard deviations for the Dutch hip hop are smaller.

Visualisation


comment

Cepstrograms


On the left:

Song: Take care Artist(s): Drake, Rihanna

On the right:

Song: Slapend Rijk Artist(s): Boef, Sevn Alias

Self-similarity matrices


On the left:

Song: Take care Artist(s): Drake, Rihanna

On the right:

Song: Slapend Rijk Artist(s): Boef, Sevn Alias